Federal retirement processing has slowed substantially this year due to DRP. As OPM continues modernizing retirement systems, another application surge looms.
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/retirement/2025/12/in-the-dar...
They seem to think the new systems helped:
> Amid the application influx, the Office of Personnel Management has also rolled out a major effort this year to modernize the legacy federal retirement system, which has long been paper-based. Many experts see the launch of OPM’s online retirement application (ORA) as a long-awaited improvement, but some remain wary of the timing, as agencies face application volumes not seen in at least a decade.
> Thiago Glieger, a federal retirement planning expert at RMG Advisors, described the converging changes as “uncharted waters” for OPM.
> “OPM has not really handled this new [ORA] system before, and this many federal employees retiring all at the same time,” he told Federal News Network.
> But Kimya Lee, OPM’s deputy associate director for Retirement Services, said having the ORA platform available this year has been crucial for managing both current and upcoming waves of retirement applications.
> “A surge like this would be extremely difficult for our legacy processing to work — it just wasn’t built for something like this,” Lee said during a Dec. 9 Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council meeting. “Despite record high retirement volumes this year, ORA is performing well. This gives us confidence as we prepare for retirement activities in 2025 and into 2026.”
> When we met with the developers in Macon, Georgia, OPM's engineering hub, they told us the PowerApps experience was so unfriendly that even they were afraid to make changes. Unless they’ve been specifically trained with PowerApps, most software developers would find it extremely unintuitive to build with, making it hard to apply classic coding skills or iterate quickly.
How much longer is it going to take project managers to realize that no-code tools are inappropriate for large, complex codebases?
Really depends. It can work great, I see some really good No/Low code tools in ERP systems. Things like alerts, workflows, custom fields, actions, etc are... you would be surprised the ingenuity of people, but also - yes there are limits.
An ERP is practically an opinionated entire operating system with its own data, conventions, rules, ACLs, etc...
But I wouldn’t build the foundation of an ERP system on stuff like that. I think you’re describing a scripting interface, rather than the core?
What i am talking about is more simple
1. user defined actions. 2. common triggers (object X Save, object Y delete) 2. user defined fields on core data tables 3. user defined tables
You can go very far with that, and a drop into a VB script, or run a prebuilt action (IE some verb on the object, like "print this document" on Save)
Written by said engineers about themselves. It's hard to read this as little more than a long-winded self-congratulatory Twitter post before the results are actually visible. It's no wonder their social handles sit at the bottom of the page to funnel followers to their page.
Without this, this effort would not have been possible.
> Fortunately, we stumbled on a critical clue. While poring over old documentation, we discovered that OPM actually had data warehouses that stored historic information about every federal employee. Apparently, these warehouses were created as part of a modernization effort in 2007, and HR and payroll offices all across government have supposedly been regularly reporting into it.
> For some reason however, this was not well known at OPM, and those that knew about it didn’t know what data it held, nor considered how it could be used to simplify retirement processing. Not many had seen the data, and administrators were initially resistant to sharing access.
> From a software perspective, this was the holy grail: a single source of truth that held all the information that the manual redundant steps were meant to review. Because the information was regularly reported by HR and payroll, by the time an employee retired, OPM should already have everything needed to process the retirement, without anyone re-entering or re-verifying information.
There's a dangerous trend I've noticed with GenZ, they're quick (sometimes to the point of seeming rushed) to show off hyperbolic-sounding achievements that are mostly hot air, and often even work stolen from others.
It's sad, but I think our generation is partly to blame since, we demanded that from them.
It must suck to lose your whole life and personality just to appease the meritocratic golem.
Steve Jobs was born in 1955, the ball has been rolling for a while now. Gen Z might just be the crowd that recognizes how lucrative it is to scam people.
> Aug 21 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump will appoint Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia to spearhead the new National Design Studio that will seek to make digital services at federal agencies more efficient, two officials familiar with the plan said.
> Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to create the studio - a new body that one of the officials said appears to be a stripped-down successor to the controversial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), formerly headed by billionaire Elon Musk.
The work described in this blog post seems to have been done under its predecessor, DOGE, given that the launch date was June 2. But apparently these engineers moved to the new organization, so that’s why the blog post is there.
silexia•1h ago
The shrinking of the federal government is much needed as there is no mechanism to remove dead wood like bankruptcy does for private industry. We do need a smoother mechanism than just hacking whatever is not protected by insane public employee unions though.
witte•1h ago
Unless a given industry is too big too fail, or requires millions to billions in corporate welfare, or where bankruptcy voids responsibility of ecological disasters and socializes the damage. Since those things have obviously never happened.
rayiner•54m ago
throwaway-11-1•31m ago
jfengel•11m ago
stocksinsmocks•11m ago
estearum•25m ago
What do you mean?
The budget is voted on by Congress literally every single year. The mechanism absolutely exists. The political consensus to do so is harder to achieve, but that's only when people actually don't universally agree change is needed (or how specifically to change it).
api•22m ago